Dig
by CzechFlagSticker
Summary: Julian Larson and Logan Wright are going to college. Far far away from each other in a world where they've never met until now, the first day that Julian's on the dig site. Just outside of Pompeii, Italy. Adventures to ensue!


In case it's not clear, this is ARCHAEOLOGY!AU

**Summary**: Julian Larson and Logan Wright are going to college. Far far away from each other in a world where they've never met until now, the first day that Julian's on the dig site. Just outside of Pompeii, Italy. Adventures to ensue!  
><strong>Word Count<strong>: 2,800  
><strong>Rating<strong>: Ehhhhhhhhhh, we'll stick with the whole T scene for now. I make no promises for where this is headed.  
><strong>AN**? I AM SO VERY SORRY TO ANYBODY WHO'S AN ACTUAL ARCHAEOLOGIST! This is probably going to be horrible for you. I know relatively nothing about archaeology, and I haven't put that much research into it…yet. Also, apologies to anybody who read the rough draft on Tumblr. It was horrible and riddled with SO MANY run on sentences. Alas, I hope you enjoy.

And you all know, I do not own Julian Larson [Armstrong-Wright] or [John] Logan [Armstrong-]Wright (yep, I did just do that. GONDOLA FOREVEERRRR). That's lovely Mamma CP; and her fic that they're involved in (Dalton) is linked on my profile. Everyone and thing else actually belongs to me though. Lots of original characters in here.

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><p>"<em>Larson, right?"<em>

"Yes sir, here for duty. Or digging. Whatever," Julian Larson says as he steps out of a neutral colored jeep and onto the vast expanse of dirt, tugging a pair of sunglasses down onto the bridge of his nose from perfectly tousled hair. He hadn't expected the place to be quite so empty.

After he'd arrived at the airport, a car had taken him and a group of his classmates to the place they'd be staying at just outside of Sorrento. It was small, but the view they had was fantastic, and it would do. They'd showered up, eaten a fresh fruit/veggie, and prosciutto sandwich lunch, and then were shuttled out 40 minutes to the barren land of dirt and sand they were now standing on, spotted with only a few canvas tents pitched here and there—people walking amongst them and out to what Julian assumed was the actual dig.

"Awesome, if you'll go check in at the tent over there," the tall, heavier set man before him pointed to one of the closest tents, "we can get you down to the site in a jiffy!" A clump of dark hair sat upon the man's head and he sported a clean shaven, pink face, his words shaking Julian out of his reverie.

"'Kay," Julian remarked, hitching the light backpack that had slid halfway off his shoulder back up onto it.

"Oh! By the way," the man started again, "I'm Boris. If you need anything during your time with us, pass my name up through the ranks and I'll be there." At that, he stuck his hand out with a smile and a general sense of finality.

They were finally here, and they would be staying for the next six weeks on the beautiful West coast of Italy, travelling in between the dig site and the city they were staying in on a daily basis, visiting everywhere they could on their off time, and digging just outside of one of the most influential and successful dig sites in the world.

Julian shook the plump hand before him and let Boris turn to the next person getting out of the car, walking towards the tent Boris had pointed to earlier himself. He paused for a moment, opening the water canteen he had filled just before leaving, and taking a long swig (he'd filled his jug up with the bottled water they'd left for him in his room, aware of the tolls the local water tap could dole to his body after coming straight from America).

"Crazy dude, huh Larson?" a boy a year or so older than Julian stepped up next to him, glancing out at the expanse before them.

"Who even names their kid Boris?" Julian quipped back after a moment as he pulled away from his bottle, glancing down to the boy besides him. He was a few inches shorter than Julian with much darker brown hair and crazy, green eyes. His name was Tony, and they'd been in the same prep classes for this trip all of first, second, and third semesters. You could call them friends looking on from outside, but in reality, it wasn't quite like that.

"He doesn't look Russian whatsoever," Tony responded with a nod.

"No," Julian agreed, looking back at the plump man again as he spun the top of his canteen back on. He shook his head amusedly and with a silent last look at Tony, started up for the tent he'd been pointed to again.

Tony took a last look at their surroundings, and then hopped into stride with Julian, only a second behind the taller boy's start.

* * *

><p>They entered the humid air of the tent at the same time, unprepared for just how much the shade was having no affect whatsoever on cooling off their sweating bodies. Julian groaned immediately, hardly paying attention to the two figures at the table before them.<p>

"Hot day, huh boys?" a woman with a thick accent drawled as she tugged a small packet of paper roughly through the air to fan herself. Her ankles were crossed up on the table and she was clearly sizing up the boys before her as they stepped up to the table. She had a forest of brown hair, naturally voluptuous and lightly wavy in the humidity, and her eyes were wild and foreign looking, though big and a deep brown. She wore shorts in the hot weather, but a beat up looking jean shirt with rolled up sleeves on top and a lacy tank top underneath. Between her accent, her aloof attitude, and her overall look, she screamed foreign sex appeal and everyone in the room was fully aware.

In comparison, the small man next to her with his hands crossed in his lap, sitting slightly hunched over with his two feet on the ground, seemed timid. His small sandy beard and thicket of matching hair did nothing to make him seem more firm, though he was the first to offer his hand up, "Jordan Hill," he introduced with a sort of small accent neither could exactly place, and Julian took his hand briefly with a nod.

"Is it always like this?" Tony questioned, turning back to the lady who had spoken earlier after he'd also shaken Jordan's hand.

The foreign sex bomb in front of them picked up a clipboard next to her with a list of names, swinging her legs back onto the solid dirt floor below them all, and handing the packet she'd dragged through the air to Jordan, "Mostly. Especially up here. When we get back into the city tonight, it should be heaven. So, you are here to check in?" Despite her accent—she was clearly native—her English was nearly flawless.

"Yeah," Julian said dryly, already not sure he was looking forward to having made this decision instead of the exchange to Canada; cool, tepid Canada. He shook himself out of the thought almost immediately, preferring to stay here and now for the time being. "Julian Larson and Tony Paietta." Julian pointed to himself and then Tony in turn, and the woman before him crossed their names off of her list. No point in getting caught up in a place he couldn't be.

"Marcella Esposito, just Marcy short," the woman responded and stood up, also stuck her hand out in greeting. The two boys shook it before she placed the clipboard back onto the table, gesturing for them to follow her, "Follow me and we can get you guys all geared up to head out. We're gonna put you with the other school group who got here a month and a half ago for the first half of the week and then you can start to move on to a few other sites later in the week. By next week, you should be up to par with everyone else and your direction will be much less supervised, and by week three, we hope to have you guys digging new sites. From there, it gets really easy. You can pretty much do whatever you want at that point so long as you don't take down the whole place. Beginning of your last week, we take you out to the actual Pompeii site for a day or two."

They marched out of the tent behind Marcy and headed towards another tent fifty feet away, leaving behind Jordan to deal with the next wave of students. They entered the new tent to the view of a stack of tool belts and various tools they'd studied and dealt with during their three semesters of prep class all sorted out onto tables and racks.

"How long is your group going to be with us again?" Marcy asked, turning to Julian and Tony, grabbing and offering two tool belts to the pair.

"Just six weeks," Julian responded, lifting his backpack off of his shoulders and adding it to a row of hooks filled with colorful and diverse bags belonging to what he assumed were the other people onsite. He turned around again, taking the belt Marcy offered and eyeballing it before wrapping it around his hips.

"Delicious," Tony laughed at Julian, strapping his own to his waist after adding his own shoulder bag to the hooks of backpacks. He turned to the tables around them, and first grabbed a bound bundle of tools that looked similar to the ones they'd usually worked with during prep classes. "These ones, right?" he turned to Marcy with the tools in hand.

Marcy smiled and nodded, stepping back into a corner and crossing her arms to watch quietly as the boys prepped.

Tony turned back around with a bounce to his steps now at the excitement of finally being on the site, and proceeded to hand a second set of tools to Julian as well.

"Thanks, Tony," Julian smiled and placed the tools into his belt the way he'd found he most liked them.

When they both had their belts the way they preferred, they continued to scour the room, grabbing things at random, and eyes grazing past the row of construction helmets on shelving, some hung on another row of hooks above one table. A bunch of them were taped up with names and doodles and almost all blotched with dirt, but they blatantly ignored them in favor of a stack of small sized notebooks and various writing utensils under a small table in the corner of the room. A new notebook for their new starting point was essential, though they both carried at least one in their hung up bags.

Tony cleared his throat as Julian handed him a notebook and a permanent marker—both preferring the permanence to how easily pens or pencils smudged—"Have they made any progress in the past few weeks? We haven't had class in a while, so we're behind on anything you guys might have gotten done recently." The question was thrown over his shoulder to Marcy.

Sure they'd take up notebook space quicker with the permanent markers, but they'd decided in second semester of classes that it was well worth it when the pen notebooks they'd written had smudged completely together in a spontaneous downpour on one of their practical trips. They'd lost a large amount of information on that trip, and nobody really wanted to reexperience that. Especially now that it was real.

"Good question," Marcy said, unfolding herself from the unoccupied corner she'd tucked herself into, satisfied with the completeness of their belts, which were now comfortably full of the tools they could need today. "We recently uncovered a few pieces of some pots—we don't think they're from the same full work—so we're going to have you guys working down there with sifters for the bigger part of today."

Tony nodded, and Julian's eyes wandered slowly back to the hard hats as he was unable to find something else he could shove into his belt.

After a moment of inner conflict—should he bring it up and be the responsible student, or should he ignore it and hope a cavern didn't fall in on his head today—he finally picked one up and grunted, "Helmets?" puckering his lips in, unhappily. His hair had looked fabulous for after-flight, and he kind of wanted to keep it that way on first day for once. Plus, in all of the videos, the guys who dug up the awesome stuff up never actually wore their hard hats.

Marcy outright laughed at him when she turned to see his face all contorted, clutching her stomach, "No no, we're down there without the hats today Julian."

Julian huffed as his eyes wandered to Tony to see he had a smirk on his face as well, his green eyes bearing into the ground as he tried to keep in his own knowing laugh; they'd had the helmet conversation many times in the field.

Marcy's giggles slowed, "Sorry, sorry. That's not one we usually get with such a face of unhappiness," she explained, and stepped finally toward the entrance to the tent.

"Evil," Julian mumbled under his breath, glaring at the two and wandering out of the tent at her gesturing hands.

* * *

><p>On their way to the dig site they'd be at today, they passed two other sites, both with an older group of people working—probably all in their mid-30s—along with a small selection of what looked like students—probably from the other college that made the trip. They all waved and greeted Marcy loudly as they walked by, Marcy waving back and saying to Julian and Tony that they'd officially be introduced to everyone during dinner that night.<p>

Four minutes later, they got there. The ledge down to the ground of the site was a couple feet deep, filled with about a dozen more university students around the same age as Tony and Julian, some a few years older, and some just a bit younger as the two newcomers were now late Juniors at their own school. Julian flipped his sunglasses back up into his hair, and his eyes drifted about the bodies below him, feeling just for a moment like King of some ant colony as they all worked away. Some of the students were sifting with the sifters set at an adjacent side of the lip, and some trucking away with the little tools. There were a couple students hopping from group to group, and a few writing things down, but none seemed to notice the small group at the lip just yet, far too entranced in their own work on the grid.

Julian's eyes worked the rows up and down, glancing at each person he'd soon be working with—a task he was well used to doing in a new place. Not even halfway through the count however, Julian's eyes skipped rows and found himself staring at one boy in particular who was working in a far corner. The boy in question was tall, and even hunched down over his work, his body showed it. Not in the awkward, lanky tall most people held though; this boy had a sort of grace to all of his movements and it drew Julian in, distracting him from continuing his original run through of the other students.

A beautiful head of striking blond hair shone in the mid-afternoon sun, and sweat slicked and beaded at the nape of his neck as he stretched over his work. Inches from the line where blond hair ended and just-tanned skin picked up, a blue tank top hung from his sturdy frame. Subtle muscles worked underneath the shirt, and beyond that legs crouched.

_Who is he?_ Julian thought, completely distracted by the boy.

"Hey guys!" Marcy shouted to the group and they all stopped what they were doing to turn around.

He was kind of far away, but Julian could see from even this distance the green eyes that shone out as the boy turned, still somehow gracefully, like he came from a family that held tea time every Friday, and valued walking with perfect posture and frame all day every day above all else.

_Jesus._

"This is Julian and Tony," Marcy introduced the two, and Tony said something, but Julian was tuning it all out. His own brown eyes were stuck, and suddenly the green from below him were staring straight back, a hint of question playing in the quirk of this new boy's head. But Julian kept on staring—too enthralled—for what seemed like a millennium (the millennium that he would look back on and come to know as his downfall); a millennium that was abruptly ended as Tony physically shook him. He glanced to Tony with a look of confusion, glanced quickly back to the blond boy who now had a smirk that could rival the size of the moon on his face and who was shaking his head of blond hair softly, and then returned his gaze to Tony, blinking a few times.

"I'm sorry, what?" he almost creaked, too quietly.

"Jesus, Larson, getting heat stroke already?"

Julian laughed weakly along with Tony and some of the group below them at the joke, but he hardly meant it and the laugh was short-lived. He was still mildly confused, missing a huge chunk of conversation everyone else had clearly gotten, and still absolutely, completely distracted. His gaze returned to the blond boy for just an instant, green eyes locked on brown again, before turning back to Tony again.

_Who is he?_

* * *

><p><em><strong>Bonus<strong>: _My crack-head playlist while writing this is here: CLICK ME! Which has turned into a few of the songs that Tony listened to on the airplane over. This playlist will probably evolve into lots of crack on top of the crack that it already is. Be warned.

_Coming up soon in Czechflagsticker writing world: _Maybe a Julogiark update, Klaine AU!, and more original story stuff that you can only find on my Tumblr.


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